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For, as the ancient teaching was, moral-discipline and courage
and every virtue, not even excepting Wisdom itself, all is
purification.
Hence the Mysteries with good reason adumbrate the immersion of
the unpurified in filth, even in the Nether-World, since the
unclean loves filth for its very filthiness, and swine foul of
body find their joy in foulness.
What else is Sophrosyne, rightly so-called, but to take no part
in the pleasures of the body, to break away from them as unclean
and unworthy of the clean? So too, Courage is but being fearless
of the death which is but the parting of the Soul from the body,
an event which no one can dread whose delight is to be his
unmingled self. And Magnanimity is but disregard for the lure of
things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of the
Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the lower places and
leading the Soul to the Above.
The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of
body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the
wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty.
Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is
beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all that
proceeds from Intellection are the Soul's beauty, a graciousness
native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly
Soul. And it is just to say that in the Soul's becoming a good
and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the
Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.
We may even say that Beauty is the Authentic-Existents and
Ugliness is the Principle contrary to Existence: and the Ugly is
also the primal evil; therefore its contrary is at once good and
beautiful, or is Good and Beauty: and hence the one method will
discover to us the Beauty-Good and the Ugliness-Evil.
And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good, must be posed as
The First: directly deriving from this First is the
Intellectual-Principle which is pre-eminently the manifestation
of Beauty; through the Intellectual-Principle Soul is beautiful.
The beauty in things of a lower order-actions and pursuits for
instance- comes by operation of the shaping Soul which is also
the author of the beauty found in the world of sense. For the
Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty,
makes beautiful to the fulness of their capacity all things
whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.
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